Issue 25 Preview: My Fingers, by Meiko Ko
Note: This story is from our latest print issue, number 25, which you can and should order right here.
One summer, I started explaining myself. There was no reason for it, or if there was, I couldn’t clarify it even to myself. It could have been the lack of talking in the previous summers, all leading up to the taciturnity of winters, the dry mouths and moody colds. Then again, talking wasn’t the same as explaining. I might have said, how have you been? and told the neighbor I’d just had noodles in the eatery at the corner, definitely a must-try. I might have paid a compliment—nice hairdo, where did you perm those bouncy curls? or asked my colleague at the office, as I’d been meaning to, where she’d gotten her pot of marigolds.
Instead I started explaining. I explained my feet. They’d been a gnarled embarrassment when I was a child, and grew into these monstrous things I hid within shoes. I explained to Dara with the marigolds that was why I turned down her invitations—at parties I might have to show off my feet. All the while I explained, she nodded uh-huh and asked for more. My explanations grew wings. I began to talk about my fingers. I held up two of them, the index and the middle on my right hand, and I explained that they were once broken. They were on splints for five years till free and mine again. These fingers contained jam, I explained. The distal phalanges were soft, I said confidingly. She didn’t quite believe me; blood and bones and cartilage were all she understood about fingers. But my face must have been serious and unrelenting enough that she asked, “What kind of jam?” to humor me. I explained that they were English jam, yes, strawberry and apricot, jam like you spread on morning toasts and add to yogurt. I told her it was a horrible experience to have fingers filled with jam, oozing out when I used the pen or scratched myself. I had to lick my constantly sticky fingers and it was a hard habit to shed. That was another reason I didn’t go to parties.
I explained that I went to a team of doctors, and one of them, a director, tried to persuade me to cut them off to be housed in a museum. He tried to sell me prosthetics and attempted to get me to undergo experiments that could possibly explain why a human woman, five feet two and a mere hundred pounds, could produce jam in the body like a factory. I had a hard time extricating myself from these doctors who claimed to be the masters of fingers and arthritis, tendons and nerves, and if she knew she knew, the hospital could be a veritable prison. All those expensive IV drips and wheelchairs.
Dara was amused by my tale. The empathetic frown lines on her forehead made her look three times older. I explained that it was a chapter of my life I wanted to see closed, no more hospitals and finger testing, as if I were an animal or a criminal or a specimen. She asked me how I left the hospital and I told her I’d rather not explain that, as it involved my benefactor, a janitor, at fifty too old to quit polishing the hallways.
She asked me how I cured them, without doctors, and I said that I wasn’t cured. None of the doctors, not even the one with the Nobel Prize, could figure out why my fingers were made of jam that changed flavor according to what I ate. Blueberry—>blueberry, cherry—>cherry. Except for rhubarb. When I ate rhubarb it was indistinguishable from apples. And when I ate apples my fingers were sour. Even red apples. “I don’t eat lemons, it’s bad for my teeth,” I explained. And for a long time I stayed away from jam, banned it from my shopping list. I wore finger gloves and sometimes bandages to stop the flow. The jam seeped out from the pores in quantities great or small, and this, as hypothesized by one of the doctors, depended on my moods. “Feeling angry? Sad, or depressed?” they’d ask each time they were able to draw ten ml of jam in ten minutes. The nurses were ordered to taste my discharges, to record on a clipboard my foods, taste, and mood of the day. They were reluctant and angry. I didn’t feel anything, whether it was two ml or ten, but I’d provide an answer. Mostly positives, like happy, elated, grateful, amazed, compassionate.
The lunch hour was almost over. I explained to Dara that by now everything was fine. My fingers got better after I left the hospital; they oozed less jam. I said my files were not yet done and they had to be in by three o’clock. I got off the bar stool to go, taking my handbag hanging from the top rail, but Dara hadn’t had enough of my story. She said, “wait,” and she grabbed my wrist, careful around my fingers. My nails had grown long, and just by looking at them, no one could tell they were filled with jam. They were as ordinary as anyone’s fingers, though I never went for manicures. She looked at me wide-eyed. I felt a moment of regret for my explanation.
“Is it only the fingers?” she asked. ”What about the rest?” I explained that the other areas were fine. Filled with blood. It was only the two fingers. We walked back to the office. She said I was surprising, astounding, that it was the first incredible story she’d ever heard. She wanted proof. “Show me,” she cajoled, “come on.” I mentioned hygiene and she said “who cares?”
We did it in the elevator. I lifted my hand, and she closed her eyes and took them in her mouth. It was moist and warm inside, her tongue an inquisitive slug. Her eyes were shiny chestnuts when she opened them.
“Beef,” she said, in complete delight.
“Yes,” I explained. “It’s the sandwich I just ate.”
The elevator doors opened. Two men were chatting and shaking hands. I went to the bathroom. My fingers slipped around the foam soap, and I could smell the commingling of beef and citrus. My fingers remained unexplainable to me, but they felt lighter, vindicated.
——
Dara came over often during the weekends. I lived near the E line; the elevated trains close to my apartment were slow enough I could see the passengers’ bored faces. Before anything else, Dara would ask for a lick. We’d sit on the couch and she’d take my hand and plunge my fingers into her mouth.
The sucking lasted for thirty minutes, the trains rattling behind us. She’d ask me what I had for lunch, and if it were pasta, what sauce. If it were pesto, she’d snort. “Alfredo is the best,” she’d say. Sometimes she brought her favorite fruits: Papaya, mango, pineapple, kiwi. She fed me, and after an hour, she’d commence sucking. Once we shared a dragon fruit and she managed to suck a seed out of my index finger. She was overjoyed. But the finger was sore, the seed larger than my pore. I told her to give it a rest.
When she wasn’t licking and sucking, when we called it quits, I brewed coffee and we drank together. She’d ask me questions. I didn’t really have any more explanations apart from my weird fingers, and my feet didn’t seem all that gnarled to her. She’d seen worse, deformed club feet and the footless unable to walk, so I kept my explanations to my fingers. She asked me when I came to know that I had such delicious fingers.
“Like you,” I explained, “one day I just started sucking. That was when I was fifteen. Living elsewhere, far away, almost another world. In that world they had different names for things. They called apartments flats, and buildings were blocks. They named their cupboards sextons, sofas kitties, kitties cookies, cookies biscuits. There were no such things as churches. Or camels, or cabals. I ate different fruits then—the milk fruit, the berry-berry, the spiked orange, the horned melon.”
Dara was impressed. She looked at me askance and anew. I began to tell her the story of the cooking oil. Really, I explained, “cooking” was a misnomer. That wasn’t what it was used for, although I found out later, when I came over here and understood this world better, indeed they were the same thing. The cooking oil here = the cooking oil in my home island. The bottles had similar labels and nutrient content, saturated and polyunsaturated fats. They were imported to the island through vast trading networks, I supposed, but we didn’t use it to cook— rather as lubricants on rattan and wicker, in soaps, as skin moisturizers, or to protect plants and feed our dogs. My mother had a bottle handy to clean her gun. She oiled it every day and slipped it into her purse before she went out. This wasn’t too different from the people in America who keep guns at home. She told me there was a playground near where we lived, and she got to practice her weapon on targets like water balloons and scarecrows. I don’t think she ever used it on anyone, but she’d have liked to use it on this man who came to our flat often. He was a horrid person who’d pretended he was part of our family. He had installed himself on our kitty, yes, our sofa, to watch TV.
He ate a lot. Two meals each day when he arrived at noon, staying for dinner and snacking the whole time. He said he could put us in jail if we ever chased him out. We couldn’t understand what he was doing, coming to us like that, rearranging our furniture and stepping into our rooms, heaping scorn on my sexton and dolls, telling me to grow up. He didn’t look mad, but like a complete, rational being with calculating brown eyes. My mother locked the door and he pounded to make a scene, and the neighbors came out to watch, thinking he was my mother’s long lost brother that she’d starved and treated ill.
We soon realized there were many like the man running around our island. Those were the years of a plague of strange men. We’d called the police and they came and looked at the man’s ID and told us they weren’t into family business. “Sort it out yourselves,” they said. My mother explained that the man was a stranger, which he was—the man was someone we didn’t know, who wasn’t in any way blood-related or part of our family. But the stranger, with a grin and sleight of hand, pulled a photograph of himself and Mom from his wallet. “There, you see, officers, she’s lying.” My mother explained that she might have gone to a party and taken a photo, but that did not mean they really knew each other, and as parties go, with the drinks, she may have forgotten. They were strangers, she explained.
“We’re family,” the man said.
As soon as the police left, the law was on his side. He installed himself as lord and made my mother a slave. He called me slave. “Hey slave, make me a bowl of noodles,” or “hey slave, shine my shoes.” With him in the flat, my mother couldn’t go to work. Her boss fired her. She hid the gun under a stack of blankets. The man took pictures of us and the flat with his cell-phone. He ransacked our drawers and took our money, bankbooks, cards, the deed to the flat. He called his friends and chatted for hours. He laughed over what he was doing, pretending to be a master, having a wife and daughter for free, playing husband with no strings attached. Yes, the woman was a good cook. The daughter was a bit too young. The décor in the flat could do better. He had a finer taste than voile curtains.
My mother continued to oil the gun. I don’t know if she ever did use it on him. When the man left, saying he couldn’t stand being in the flat all day, my mother called up an aunt in America. She said she was sending me over on the soonest flight out. She packed my clothes hastily in a carry-on. The man had changed the padlock to our flat, so my mother broke it with an axe. We took the bus to a bank where she explained that she’d lost her bankbook. She gave her thumbprint and ID number and she signed a form to close the account.
Afterwards, we took a train to the travel agency. The woman there recognized the harried look on my mother’s face but she said nothing, she only typed very quickly, put me on the next flight, and handed over the ticket in an envelope. I asked my mother why she wasn’t coming, why I was the only one leaving. She shushed me and gripped my wrist tight and we took a taxi to the airport. At the gate I asked her again why she wouldn’t come with me, and she said, “I have to protect the flat.” Then she gave me a hug, a shove, and I was ushered away by the immigration officer.
Dara frowned. She said it was dramatic and unbelievable, what a sad story. She asked me how this was related to my jam-filled fingers. I explained that it wasn’t. My fingers were genetic, and I’d never met my father. My mother said nothing about him and I didn’t have the chance to ask. But the whole time the man was in my flat, I was biting and sucking my fingers. A sweet, clear, sometimes milky sap seeped out of the tips and that was how I found out I had jam fingers. On the sixteen hour flight to America, the stewardess served grape jam and I ate it spread on a mini croissant. That was my first taste. There’d been no such jam on my island. I was going to start the story of my aunt—how she was disgusted with my licking and sent me for treatment to a psychiatrist, who believed that my fingers were illusory phalluses (he was wrong); how I’d wanted to stop this and one night I brought a hammer down on my fingers, and things blew up, the tests revealing that there wasn’t blood inside. But Dara wasn’t interested anymore; her face turned inward. She wanted one more suck before she left. The sap was bitter coffee, though, and she quit after five minutes. She got up, gathering the uneaten fruits to take home.
At the door, in the hallway fluorescence, we kissed a tired goodbye. I wasn’t sure if it was something I’d over-explained that had turned her away, or if she was suddenly bored with me, but we stopped going out for lunch soon after, and she no longer called on me during the weekends. At the office we’d bump into each other in the elevator or the bathroom and say hi, wash our hands, blow them dry, and go back to our desks as though nothing had been said. As though I was never in her eager mouth, with her hot tongue curling, probing, enveloping the skin on my sticky fingers.
Meiko Ko’s works have been published by Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Crab Orchard Review, failbetter, Juked, The Hong Kong Review, ANMLY, The Offing, the Longleaf Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2023 Anthology, Atticus Review, Nat.Brut, Sleepingfish magazine, Southampton Review, Inscape, A Velvet Giant among other places, and is forthcom- ing in Frigg. She is a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for the 2020 Puerto del Sol prose contest, and has been longlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize. Her writing has received support from Bennington Writing Seminars, Vona, the Kenyon Review, One Story, Granta, Tin House, and Anaphora Arts. She can be reached at twitter @Ishihara2006 and https://www.facebook.com/meiko.ko.3